Not the Prologue of John

Abstract

This article considers the history of the transmission of the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel and the ways in which the text was divided or not divided into segments by commentators (e.g. Ptolemy, Heracleon, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril, Philoxenus), liturgical systems and the scribes of early manuscripts (e.g. Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Syriac). There is then investigation of the division of the text in the period of print from 1495 (the first printing of Jn 1.1-14) to the present. It is found that systems that regarded Jn 1.1-5, 1-14, or 1-17 as a unit preceded those that regarded 1.1-18 as a unit and that these earlier analyses each have distinct exegetical advantages over the common modern position of viewing 1.1-18 as a unit. The reasons for the currently preferred division and its exegetical consequences are explored with the conclusion that Jn 1.1-18 should not be regarded as the prologue of the Fourth Gospel.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.